Few luxury brands carry a name that doubles as a verb. To say you have lost a Choo – that breathless, almost operatic cry of Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City – is to invoke a specific vocabulary of desire. It is shorthand for craftsmanship that bends the foot into architecture, for glamour that does not ask permission. Jimmy Choo, the brand, became synonymous with a particular kind of modern femininity: unapologetic, sculpted, and unafraid of height. But the story behind that name begins not on a red carpet but in a workshop in Penang, where a boy of eleven made his first pair of slippers and, in doing so, wrote the opening line of a three-decade legend.
The Penang Roots
Jimmy Choo Yeang Keat was born on 15 November 1948 in Bukit Mertajam, in the Crown Colony of Penang. He was the son of a Hakka Chinese shoemaker whose trade was taught from father to son with the quiet discipline of inherited craft. “My parents were shoemakers and I have followed my father’s lead. He inspired me,” Choo told the South China Morning Post. By the age of eleven, he had fashioned his first pair of shoes – a pair of slippers that demonstrated not merely aptitude but an instinct for form that would define his life.
The Malaysian honours that would later cascade upon him – Dato’ from Pahang in 1999, Dato’ from Penang in 2004, and the Commander of the Order of Meritorious Service in 2013 – were still decades away. What mattered in those early years was the tactile education: the understanding that leather yields to patience, that a last must conform to the specific geography of a foot, that beauty without structure is merely decoration. This was the foundation upon which everything would be built.
London and the Birth of a Vision
In 1982, Choo enrolled at Cordwainers Technical College in Hackney – now part of the London College of Fashion – where he spent two years refining his technical knowledge. Between 1982 and 1984, he studied the anatomy of footwear with the same seriousness that a medical student brings to the human body. Upon graduating, he worked at two design companies for a total of nine years before the pull of independence became irresistible. With the support of the Prince’s Trust and the quiet sacrifice of his parents, who emigrated to Britain to help him get started, Choo opened his first workshop in 1986 in a converted space in the old Metropolitan Hospital on Kingsland Road, N1. He was distributing shoes at a local market stall and catering to a clientele that grew by word of mouth and by the sheer, undeniable quality of what he produced.
The breakthrough came in 1988. British Vogue ran an eight-page spread on his designs – a coup that transformed a local artisan into a name whispered in the salons of the fashion industry. Choo has said that his designs became significantly more popular after the Vogue coverage. The timing was immaculate. London was entering a period of cultural assertion, and the city’s fashion establishment was hungry for new voices that could bridge tradition and modernity.
The Diana Factor
If Vogue opened the door, Princess Diana walked through it. From the early 1990s, the Princess of Wales became a devoted patron of Choo’s bespoke creations, summoning him to Kensington Palace after discovering his name in the press. “I was so excited I could not sleep the whole night. In fact I was so scared of oversleeping that I practically stay awaked,” Choo later recounted to the New Straits Times. The relationship between a Malaysian-born shoemaker and the most photographed woman in the world was improbable on its face, but it spoke to something deeper: Diana’s instinct for authenticity, and Choo’s capacity to deliver it. Each pair of couture shoes required two weeks to manufacture with the assistance of eight people. The process was laborious, the results unmistakable. At this stage, Choo was limited to producing only twenty pairs per week – a constraint that was not a weakness but a signature.
The Diana patronage did more than elevate Choo’s reputation; it established a template. The brand would become a red-carpet staple not through aggressive marketing but through the quiet gravity of being exactly right for the moment. Actresses like Halle Berry and Cate Blanchett would later wear Jimmy Choo to Academy Award ceremonies, cementing the association between the brand and the pinnacle of public glamour.
Tamara Mellon and the Architecture of Scale
The transformation of Jimmy Choo from a niche bespoke label into a global luxury powerhouse owes its existence to a single partnership. Tamara Mellon, then the accessories editor at British Vogue, had been a frequent collaborator with Choo, often asking him to customise shoes for editorial shoots. In 1995, she proposed developing a luxury ready-to-wear line. The company was formally established in May 1996 when Tom and Ann Yeardye – Mellon’s parents – invested £150,000 in return for fifty per cent of Jimmy Choo Limited. The first store opened that autumn on Motcomb Street in London, with an eighteen-year-old saleswoman named Hannah Colman – who would, three decades later, become the company’s chief executive.
The debut collection was an instant success, earning acclaim for designs that married Choo’s artisanal sensibility with the accessibility of ready-to-wear. The brand’s US entry in November 1998 – with boutiques in New York’s Olympic Tower off Fifth Avenue and a joint venture with Vidal Sassoon in Los Angeles – coincided with the cultural earthquake of Sex and the City. When Carrie Bradshaw lost her Choo on a New York street in the show’s third-season premiere, the brand transcended fashion and entered the lexicon. It was no longer merely a shoe; it was an aspiration made tangible.
The Founder’s Departure and Sandra Choi’s Quiet Revolution
By 2001, the tensions between Choo’s devotion to couture and the commercial imperatives of scaling ready-to-wear had become irreconcilable. “I love the idea of couture and its emphasis on creation. I leave the ready-to-wear to my partner and team,” he told interviewers at the time. In April of that year, Choo sold his fifty per cent stake for £10 million – a figure that, by some accounts, was later revised downward to £8.8 million following the revaluation of the business in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, when Phoenix Equity Partners recalibrated the company’s worth from the £50 million the Yeardyes had sought to £18 million. The deal closed on 19 November 2001.
What followed was a succession of ownership changes – Lion Capital in 2004, TowerBrook Capital Partners in 2007, Labelux in 2011 – each of which could have fractured the brand’s identity. It did not, and the reason was Sandra Choi. Choo’s wife’s niece had joined him in 1989 and had been responsible for overseeing the design studio from the brand’s earliest days. In 2013, she was appointed sole Creative Director, a role in which she has quietly but decisively reshaped Jimmy Choo’s identity for a new generation.
Choi’s vision has been one of controlled evolution. Under her leadership, the brand has expanded into handbags, leather goods, eyewear, and fragrances – each category an extension of the original promise of sophistication and empowerment. Collections like 24:7 Icons and Memento have celebrated the brand’s heritage while introducing it to audiences who may never have seen Diana’s shoes or heard Carrie’s cry. In 2019, Choi was inducted into the Footwear News Hall of Fame – a recognition that placed her alongside the most consequential figures in the history of shoe design.
The Capri Holdings Era and Global Reach
The acquisition of Jimmy Choo by Michael Kors Holdings – subsequently rebranded as Capri Holdings – in November 2017 for £896 million represented the most significant inflection point since the brand’s founding. The deal brought Jimmy Choo into a portfolio that included Versace and Michael Kors, but it also posed a question that every luxury acquisition provokes: could the brand maintain its distinctiveness within a conglomerate structure?
The evidence suggests it can. As of the brand’s most recent publicly available financial disclosures, Jimmy Choo operates over 200 boutiques worldwide, with a presence in department and specialty stores across every major market. Revenue for the year ending 31 December 2016 was reported at £364 million, with operating income of £42.5 million. The company employs 1,278 people – a modest number for a brand of its global footprint, and one that speaks to the efficiency of its operations under CEO Hannah Colman, who assumed the role in late 2020 after more than two decades with the company.
The brand’s ambassador strategy reflects a deliberate pivot towards Asia and the global K-pop and C-pop audiences. In August 2023, Cho Mi-yeon of (G)I-dle was named global brand ambassador, and in September 2024, Chinese actor Wang Yibo assumed the same role. These appointments are not mere celebrity endorsements; they are calculated investments in cultural capital, aligning Jimmy Choo with the entertainment ecosystems that now drive luxury consumption across the Asia-Pacific region.
A Cultural Symbol, Not Just a Brand
What distinguishes Jimmy Choo from its competitors in the crowded luxury footwear market is not merely the quality of its products – though that quality remains a given – but the brand’s ability to function as a cultural symbol. It is a name that carries meaning beyond its material form: a marker of aspiration, of femininity, of the specific pleasure that comes from wearing something that has been designed not merely to be seen but to be felt.
From a workshop in Penang to the London Stock Exchange, from a pair of slippers made by an eleven-year-old boy to a global empire of over two hundred boutiques, Jimmy Choo’s trajectory is a story about the transformative power of craft – and about the people who ensured that craft did not become a relic. Sandra Choi’s quiet stewardship, Hannah Colman’s operational discipline, and the enduring vision of a brand that has never lost sight of what made it matter in the first place: the belief that a shoe, made with care and worn with conviction, can be more than an accessory. It can be a declaration.
